MSI Stealth A16 AI+ Ultra Slim Gaming Laptop (2024 release, A3HVGG-002US) Review

#sponsored #freeproduct Lightweight, fast, powerful,great battery life and visual display. Amazon Affiliate Product Link: https://geni.us/TGYMT5o As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. #CommissionsEarned The laptop measures 14" wide, 10" from back to front, and is 1" at the back tapering down to 13/16" at the front. It weighs a little over 4.5 lbs but tops 6 lbs once you add in the weight of the 240W charger and power cable. For I/O it has a combo mic/headphone jack, USB-C 4 port with DisplayPort 2.1 out and PD-in charging, 2x USB-A 3.2 Gen 2 ports, 2.5Gb Ethernet jack, HDMI 2.1 out and proprietary power port. A mirror-finish accent bar runs across the backside bearing the "Stealth" branding and the chassis of the laptop is all metal, black, Magnesium-Aluminum alloy finish that is pretty good at hiding fingerprints. The logo is a subtle etched dragon/shield logo. It has a pre-installed 1TB WD SN560 SSD with a secondary 2280 m.2 NVMe Gen 4 slot available for additional storage. The DC power connector is reversible though it can also charge via Power Delivery up to 100 Watts. The laptop's screen opens to a fully lay flat orientation, runs Windows 11, and supports WiFi 7. Login options include: password, Microsoft Hello facial recognition, fingerprint reader, and PIN. The 16" diagonal IPS display has a 16:10 ratio and 240Hz max refresh rate, max resolution of 2560 x 1600, and covers 100% of the DCI-P3 colorspace. Colors are bright and vibrant with decent contrast. The 2 MP webcam with IR can record 30fps video at 1080p with automatic background blurring and eye tracking. A built-in privacy cover lets you "disable" the webcam. The dual-array microphone captures audio clearly with good left/right separation. Inside, it runs on the AMD Ryzen AI 9-365 CPU, 32GB of 7500MHz LPDDR5x RAM and has an NVIDIA GeForce RTX4070 discrete GPU. The CPU also has integrated graphics, AMD’s Radeon 880M, available for use in MSHybrid graphics mode, with MUX switching. The per-key RGB backlit keyboard is fully customizable with individually addressable and re-assignable keys, but the LEDs could be brighter and lettering more legible. The keys have a high actuation force and feel mushy when you bottom them out. During heavy use, like gameplay, the back end of the laptop can get hot internal temps hover in the mid to high 70s °C. Even so, the fans don’t run super hard and noise from them is fairly low. The mousepad is generously sized with a 5-1/8" x 3-1/4" area. This laptop has a 99.9 Whr battery and can last over 13 hours with energy saving while best performance settings run around 3 hours. The RTX4070 let me play games like Warframe, CS:2, and Path of Exile at Ultra video settings and handled them perfectly. Fast motion and visuals were super smooth and framerates regularly topped 100 fps depending on the game and settings. When playing games, I didn’t notice any tearing or stuttering during fast-paced motion thanks to G-sync and a fast response time. For non-gaming purposes like content creation, rendered 4K video exported quickly and file transfers were fast. Speakers on this unit sound pretty good too. The system natively supports AI with 50 NPU TOPS (80 total AI TOPS) running locally. Microsoft’s Copilot can generate both text and limited images daily as a "free" user, while "Copilot Pro" that unlocks more features and extra boosts for image generation. Using the AI is kind of fun, and it has recall tied to your Microsoft account, so it should remember past interactions. An internet connection is required for its use. Overall, the Stealth A16 is a high-powered laptop that functions well as both a portable gaming rig and creative studio for content creators. Its aesthetics are clean and unassuming -- stealthy. The fast CPU, NPU, and GPU, quality display, and ample processing power give you the tools you’ll need to run programs for audio, video, and image editing or AI content generation and also contemporary AAA title games at very high to ultra video settings smoothly. While touted as ultra-slim, I still find it a tad on the heavy side, considering you’ll probably want to take the charging brick with you, but the battery life is decent for everyday computing tasks when you’re on-the-go as well. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases Amazon Affiliate Product Link: https://geni.us/TGYMT5o